The Wind Whales of Ishmael

by Philip José Farmer

  From time to time, as he drank more shahamchiz, Ishmael looked down through the floor. The long furious rains had swollen the dead seas so that they had drowned their near shores and in many places had joined other seas. Where he had first landed, he would now find water and would have to dive a dozen feet or more to reach the roof of the jungle.

  One of the seas they passed during that long lunch was red, and Ishmael, asking about it, was told that the red air brit had been forced down into the water by the rains.

  "Does that explain why I have seen no clouds of brit?" he said.

  "Yes," the captain said. "The rains are vitally needed, and they must come, or else all life dies. But they also bring some bad, as every good does. They wash out the brit, and it takes many days before the breeding grounds to the west can produce new. During this time, the great wind whales go hungry and get lean. And the smaller life which feeds on the brit also starves. And the sharks and other predators find that they can eat more of the weakened browsers. They stuff themselves and grow fat, and it is then that the sharks breed. But their eggs, which they produce by the billions, and which float in clouds like the brit, are eaten by the whales. Only a few of the eggs hatch. So I can also say that the bad brings some good with it.

  "After a while, the seeds of the great plants that grow far to the west, at the base of the cliffs there" --Africa? Ishmael thought, India? Indo-China? --"explode and send the brit high. And the whales begin to eat that, and the sharks eat the smaller creatures and occasionally a sick or wounded whale, and everything is restored as it was before the rains came."

  The conversation turned to other matters, including Ishmael's story of the world from which he had come and what had happened after he had met Namalee. Ishmael understood after a while that Namalee had said nothing of the times when he had touched her or they kept each other warm. She must not have been exaggerating when she had said that her people would kill him if he molested a "vestal virgin." By molesting, of course, she meant even an accidental touch.

  On an altar of bone was a bone box. Namalee took her place before it, donning a headdress of bone on which hundreds of the tiny red brit had been glued. A tiny fire burned in a wooden cup before the box.

  All of the crew except those on duty were there. They fell to their knees when Namalee turned to them, intoning something in a language that was not the one she had taught Ishmael. He dropped to his knees too, because he felt that the others expected it. There was no reason to be stiff-necked or even discourteous. Nor was this the first time he had made obeisance to un-Christian gods, he thought. There was Hypocrisy and Greed and Hate and a pantheon of other deities of civilization. And he had taken part in the worship of Queequeg's idol, Yojo, with no afterqualms at all.

  He got to his knees before the altar and the box, reflecting as the floor skin sagged under his weight and he looked down through thousands of feet of air, that he had never been so close to eternity before in a temple.

  Namalee turned, still chanting, and lifted the box up. It had hidden an image about a foot high, carved of some ivory-white substance striated with red, green and black. It was half-whale and half-human, combining a bestial face with a human torso to the waist and a wind whale's tail where the legs should have been. It radiated an odor that was sweet and pleasant and, he was certain, intoxicating.

  He had drunk enough shahamchiz to make him reel a little when he walked. But on sniffing the odor of the idol, he felt his senses staggering and after a while he fell flat on his face. Within a few seconds, he had passed out.

  He awoke on the floor looking through several miles of air at the half-dead seas beneath. When he managed to sit up, groaning, he found that he was alone. His head ached as if he had been hit with a hammer. Or as if the Urfather of all hangovers had visited him just to show what gigantic aches the head of Adam had endured.

  The box was over the idol. The remnants of the sweet and drunk-making odor were still in the room.

  He staggered back to his cubicle and lay down and went to sleep.

  When he awoke, he intended to ask about the perfume and its effects, but he found everybody too busy to talk to him. All the scurrying about and the transmission of orders was caused by the sighting of a pod of wind whales. The captain had decided that they must pause in their return homeward to hunt for food. Otherwise they would starve before they got near Zalarapamtra.

  Ishmael felt much improved and, though his discretion told him that he was foolish, he asked the captain if he could take part in the hunt. He listed his qualifications, most of which consisted of a long and intense experience in hunting the monsters of the sea. But he could not see why he could not adapt himself to the requirements of the air.

  "We could use an extra hand," Captain Baramha said. "But we can't have any clumsy or ignorant persons interfering at a critical moment. However, you do know how to sail, and the main difference between your experience and that of my crew is that you will be sailing in three dimensions instead of two. Very well. You will go with Karkri's boat. Go there at once and get your instructions."

  The crew of an air ship never carried more than two extra hands because of weight restrictions. The Roolanga had lost one man early in its voyage when he had leaped or fallen off the ship while on night watch. Then Rashvarpa had died when thrown out of the boat, and a companion had broken his bones. So, needing all the help he could get, even if it was inexpert, the captain had accepted Ishmael.

  Karkri, the harpooner, was not of the stature or musculature of the savage harpooners, men like lions, that Ishmael had known. No Daggoos, Tashtegos or Queequegs, these men were short and slight. Their legs were thin but their shoulders and arms were well developed. It did not take powerful muscles to drive a shaft into the head of a wind whale, if a man knew where to cast. There were many large openings in the skull under the thin tissue wrapping it. At the last moment the harpooner had to stand in the bow of the bucking boat as it ran alongside the monster and, hooking his feet under leather straps secured to the skin of the bottom of the boat, throw his lance. If it went through one of the wide gaps in the fragile and hollow structure, it would drive into the brain, the heart or the lungs. These organs were located inside the head, the kidneys, liver, spleen and others being strung out along the largely hollow interior of the whale's body. The whale, if stripped of his skin, would be revealed as mostly air and bladders enclosed in the bones. Ishmael, thinking of this and wondering if there was enough meat on the leviathan to justify the dangerous hunt, got into Karkri's boat. The harpooner looked dubious but said nothing. A sailor, Koojai, told Ishmael what he had to do. Ishmael had talked to some of the crew about the boats before the great storm and so knew the theory of sailing an air boat.

  The two masts, one on top and one on the bottom, were swiveled to the horizontal by a joint near the butt and locked in place. The masts and yardarms were very slim and very light sections of bones fitting tightly into one another. After the boat was cast loose the crewmen rose, crouching. One reached down through a hole in the bottom of the hull, which was only a thin transparent skin, and unlocked the joint. Then, pulling on lines, they straightened the mast out and relocked it at the joint. The yardarm of the fore-and-aft rig was unlocked, straightened properly and relocked.

  The upper mast was shorter and its sail smaller to ensure that it was more than counterbalanced by the mast beneath. After it was raised, the sail of the undermast was unfurled by lines attached to it. There were many small holes on the skin of the bottom so that a sailor could reach through to do his work. These had to be watched for when a crewman walked around the boat, but there was little walking once the sails were set.

  Karkri had unfolded the enormous rudders, horizontal and vertical, used to steer the ship. He gave it over to the steersman and crawled as close to the central part of the boat as he could. In this light vessel, balance was important, and every shift of weight had to be carefully performed.

  The sails caught the wind, and the boat forged swi
ftly ahead, overtaking the enormous mother ship even though it was departing at an angle from it. Ishmael, as the green hand, tended to the care of the upper sail. Koojai watched the other sail through the clear skin of the boat, ready to pull or release lines as ordered. If Koojai failed to receive an order because the harpooner was too busy or incapacitated, Koojai would carry out the operation on his own. It was also necessary for him to keep an eye on the inexperienced man and to make sure that he carried out his functions at the same time. It would never do to swing the upper boom one way and the lower another.

  Karkri, having secured himself in the seat at the bow, then told his crew that they were out for air sharks, too.

  "We need meat, men. Meat to feed us and the bladder- creatures. Even if we killed every one of the thirty giants in the pod ahead of us, we still would not have enough. So when the sharks come nosing around to tear at our quarry, we will tear at them."

  The boat passed the ship. Ishmael saw Namalee standing on a catwalk on the starboard side, and he smiled at her. She smiled back and then she disappeared.

  Ishmael saw that the bow of the ship was now opened and asked Koojai about it.

  "When the ship enters the brit-cloud, it will act like a wind whale," Koojai said. "The tiny creatures will billow into the funnel-like opening, and they will be caught in nets and reaped. They are hard on the teeth if a man tries to crunch them raw, but cooked they become soft. They make a very nutritious and passably palatable soup."

  There were four other boats out. One was teamed with Karkri's, and it sailed about a quarter of a mile to the north on a parallel course with his. The common quarry was a leviathan the color of a ripe plum. Koojai said that it was a bull, and it was the rear sentinel of the pod. It rolled from side to side and traced an invisible wiggly line on the horizontal plane as it tried to keep all four boats in its sight. Then it was within the red cloud, and a moment later Ishmael's boat plunged after it. But the crew had placed goggles over their eyes and wrapped thin skins around their mouths. Thousands of tiny parachute shapes, each about the size of a pumpkin seed, pelted Ishmael. They broke up against the hard skin of his goggles and smeared them with red. He had to keep wiping away at them to see anything, though there was nothing to see even when they were clean.

  Presently Karkri ordered that everybody should scoop out with one hand the piles of tiny bodies collecting on the bottom of the boat. Ishmael, keeping one hand free for handling the lines, scraped up handful after handful and cast them to one side. But others fell in a reddish snowstorm and piled up, and the boat became sluggish.

  There were spaces within the cloud free of the brit, however, for some reason of which no one had informed Ishmael. The illumination within was like twilight, and the monster ahead had become quite black. There was also less wind, and the sails did not belly out so fully. This loss of speed was matched by that of the whales, who had gained weight while going through the cloud. They had taken on great cargos of the brit, which were being distributed through the stomachs looped like spaghetti strings along the bones of the tail.

  Ishmael dipped his hand again and again until the brit, like seeds, had been scattered outward. By then the two boats were about two hundred feet apart and about three hundred feet behind the great tail-fins. There they stayed, unable to catch up with the beast, and then they dived into the semisolid cloud again.

  Once more they emerged into a cleared space, as if coming from a forest into a meadow. This time they found themselves between two of the monsters, the second meal having slowed most of the pod. And, after being bailed out again, the boats increased their speed. Soon Ishmael's was even with the whale's head and drawing up to the eye, red as the heart of a forge, big and round as a factory chimney, yet seeming small in the Brobdingnagian skull.

  The beast rolled forty-five degrees each way on its axis, striving to learn if there were other hunters below or above it. Then it steadied and sailed on, though it could have evaded its pursuers by discharging a ballast of water or loosing gas. It would not if it followed the age-old ways of its ancestors; a whale never seemed to learn that a lance would fly out for the hole in the skull about ten feet back of the eye.

  Karkri stood up, his feet shoved under straps on the floor. He raised his goggles and he checked again the coiling of the line around the fore post. Then he raised his free hand, the other holding the long thin bone shaft with the long thin bone head, and he made a short chopping movement.

  Koojai stood up also. He twisted the end of a short stick of polished brown wood and then hurled it into the air straight up. It turned over and over, high above the upper mast, high above the head of the beast. Almost at the same time, a similar stick appeared on the other side of the head. Both exploded at one end. Smoke curled out in streamers that described circles as the sticks, still rotating, began to fall.

  The twisting of one end had broken off a chemical which flowed into another and set off a generation of gas. This ruptured the thin end and, with the inrush of air, the chemicals began to burn.

  The sticks were the signals that the boats were ready. Whoever threw the first stick waited until the second gave its signal before taking action.

  Karkri balanced himself, rocking a little, the floor giving way to each shift of weight and the boat also rocking. Then he hurled the lance and the line, thin almost to the point of invisibility, followed. The shaft tore through the skin of the beast and disappeared.

  Karkri had sunk to one knee after the throw. Now he fell back and grabbed the strap and buckled its wooden tongue to hold him fast to the bow position. The line whirled off a spindle as the beast loosed from its underside several tons of silvery water. It rose swiftly, rotating its wing-sails so that they would present the least surface to the air during its ascent.

  Ishmael had but one chance to look at the leviathan, and then he was busy furling the sail. Koojai worked to draw up the sail of the undermast. The rudderman waited for the jerk that would either snatch the craft upward or break the line.

  Ishmael tied up the sail and secured the boom. He looked upward. The whale was dwindling, though it was still huge. The other boat was even with them, its crew waiting tensely for the first jerk of the line. The harpooner turned his dark face and flashed white teeth at Karkri.

  The line raced outward and upward from the whistling spindle, which leaned forward a little on the hinge at its lowest end. Abruptly, the spindle stopped, and the nose of the boat turned upward, and then the boat was rising. Though the line looked fragile enough for Ishmael to pull it apart with his hands, it held. Together, the two boats soared.

  The wind whale was almost two hundred yards above them. Below, the red cloud drifted by. The Roolanga was hidden in it for a moment and then it emerged from the western side, beating against the wind. The other boats were a mile to the east and somewhat below, also being dragged upward by a beast.

  The wind whistled through the rigging. The air became colder and the sky darker. Their heads grew light, and they had to suck in deep breath. Far below, the Roolanga was a stick with wings.

  Karkri, despite the weakness caused by the thin air, was winding the spindle with a stick he had inserted through a hole. It was now necessary that the boats be drawn as closely as possible to the animal before he decided to dive. Rising, he could not jerk the line nearly as violently as he would when he loosed the gas from the bladders and upended and fell head-foremost. And so Karkri and the harpooner in the other boat worked as swiftly as they could. And when they could not move an arm, and their breaths came so strongly that it seemed they must burn their throats, they secured the spindle and crawled aft. Ishmael relinquished his post to Karkri and took up the task. Though he was larger and more heavily muscled, he did not last as long as Karkri. If they had been at sea level, where he had spent most of his life, he might have surpassed the little brown man. But here, in the upper reaches to which Karkri was accustomed, Ishmael's breath gave out and his arms felt as if he were convalescing from a long illness.r />
  Koojai, grinning at Ishmael, crawled past him to take his turn. Then the steersman gave up his post to Karkri, and after a while Karkri was working again. Ishmael took his second turn, lasting a shorter time than the first. By the third turn of duty, he felt as if he could not crawl to the bow, let alone turn the spindle, which now seemed to have rusted tight. But he went up the almost vertical slope of the deck, using the holes in it as a ladder, and strapped himself in and strove mightily to make a few turns. He succeeded, locked the spindle, and crawled back. Once he looked back, and he wished that he had not. Where was the Roolanga?

  The boats had drawn up steadily until they were now about thirty feet behind the gigantic fin-sails. Karkri called a halt then. If the whale dived now, he could not put too sudden a strain on the lines.

  Ishmael's heart would not stop pounding, and his breath sawed in and out. The whale was getting dim; was this the prelude to the fuzziness of mind, the sometimes suicidal actions resulting from the drunkenness of the heights? He hoped that the others, who were better able to live in this poverty of atmosphere, would watch over him. Perhaps...

  He came fully to his senses with the air rushing by and the sky suddenly not quite so dark. The boat was tipped almost vertically downward. The dead sea sparkled in the light of the red sun; the Roolanga was directly below and seemed destined to be struck headlong by the beast.

  Indeed, this had happened before, though never, according to the sailors, by design. The whale sometimes miscalculated its vectors and struck a ship. And when that happened the ship was lucky to stay in one piece.

  They shot within fifty feet of the Roolanga. Ishmael saw the men staring out at them from behind the transparent skin and in the open spaces. Some heads were also sticking up out of cockpits on the upper deck, or top, of the vessel. Some waved; others joined their hands together and bowed forward, praying to the lesser god of the ship and to Zoomashmarta that this dive end safely for their fellows. Though several minutes must have passed, they seemed seconds. The earth spread outward; the shores of the sea shot away; and then there was nothing but water below.